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“For five years together he was continually Drunk: not all the while under the visible effects of it, but his blood was so inflamed, that he was not in all that time cool enough to be perfectly Master of himself.”

So says a contemporary of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, explaining one of the most amusing mishaps of the 17th-century court. Instead of handing King Charles II a poem mocking the ladies of the court (entitled Signior Dildo), a tired and emotional Rochester turned in a vicious lampoon of the King instead. “Poor Prince!” it ran. “Thy prick,